Recalibrating Research on Translation and Interpreting to Explore Communicative Ecologies in Organizations

Global health and environmental crises have thrown into sharp relief the interrelatedness of human agency with the ecological systems in which it is embedded. Translation studies has seen a recent interest in connections between ecology and translation and interpreting (T&I). These developments parallel those in other disciplines that can deepen our understanding of situated T&I, principally communicative ecology. The communicative ecology model can help improve our interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge of the interactive dynamics between T&I and the predominantly organizational settings in which they take place. Organization studies provides a powerful framework in the form of “Communication Constitutes Organization” (CCO), where recent research indicates that translators’ agency can be a valuable organizational asset, but one whose impact is restricted by self-concept issues and overly linear, top-down processes that prevent translators’ and other agents’ interactive involvement in both conveying and shaping organizational identities and strategic messages. The time is ripe to recalibrate research to address the ecological dimensions of organizational T&I. By applying the methods of translatorial linguistic ethnography and ethnographic action research in networks, we can come to understand the rich layers of the communicative ecologies where translators and interpreters work, and act purposefully on the findings.


Introduction
Global health and environmental crises have thrown into sharp relief the interrelatedness of human beings and their agency with the ecological systems in which they are embedded. The keener awareness of ecology that such visibility has provided appears to have proliferated the use of the concept as a metaphor in numerous disciplines in order to convey, and in some cases model, the complex interrelations between human beings and the socio-technical systems with which they interact. In these contexts, the concept of ecology has thus been invested with numerous connotations, associations and nuances over the years, according to the particular disciplinary perspective, theoretical aspect or research approach applied, but the core definition remains the same. The Oxford English Dictionary Online 1 gives us as a first set of definitions: "The branch of biology that deals with the relationships between living organisms and their environment. Also: the relationships themselves, esp. those of a specified organism"; "Chiefly Sociology. The study of the relationships between people, social groups, and their environment; (also) the system of such relationships in an area of human settlement"; and "In extended use: the interrelationship between any system and its environment; the product of this". More straightforwardly, Merriam Webster's Online Dictionary 2 gives us: "a branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments" and "the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment".
For the purposes of this paper, we therefore extract the following simple definition of ecology -as a concept rather than a discipline of study: "the system or pattern of interrelations between language mediators and their environment". The present paper considers why and how we should investigate the ecologies of translation and interpreting (T&I) in the organizational settings in which these activities take place. The transversal assumptions and key messages contained in the paper are, first, that understanding human and T&I agency means understanding ecological systems; second, that T&I ecologies are manifest in the organizations where T&I are practiced; and third, that, if T&I ecologies are to be properly, purposefully and fruitfully addressed, we need to recalibrate research and training to accommodate broader network-oriented, workplace-based approaches that involve a combination of ethnographic observation and network action research.
After all, just as the study of biosphere ecology implies and imposes an ethical responsibility on actors, including the researchers themselves, to go beyond detached, disengaged observation and description in order to attempt to engender change, so some of the incipient eco-holistic and eco-systemic concepts that have relatively recently entered translation studies suggest that the ecological agency of language mediators, and the researchers investigating them, bear similar responsibilities (e.g. Cronin 2003Cronin , 2017Cronin , 2019. Those responsibilities have been conceived and apportioned largely through the biophysical and socio-political prisms of dwindling environmental resources and their social and economic consequences, but they could in essence apply to any ecological system at any level -including societal, transnational, national, communal, organizational or social relations and resources, right down to the psycho-physical resources of individual human beings. At each level, the role that communication -and by extension T&I -can and does play should not be underestimated. In his ecology of attention, for example, Citton (2014: 46;as cited in Cronin 2017: 23-25) stresses the centrality of media ecology, which he considers the key determinant of the way we communicate, in channelling attention towards ecologies of biophysical, geopolitical, socio-political and mental resources. This prompts Cronin (2017: 25) to ask: "How is translation to be conceived of in this ecology of attention and what are the implications […]?". The present paper attempts to broach the question of how T&I actually work in the communicative ecologies of organizations by looking at beneficial, transdisciplinary ways of approaching organizational T&I ecologies.

The concept of ecology in translation studies
The metaphorical use of the ecological concept is relatively widespread in translation studies, as it is in many of the disciplines that have fed into it, such as second-general cognitive science (Hutchins 2010), media studies (McLuhan 1964;Postman 1970) and communication studies (Altheide 1995). Thus, experimental and workplace researchers refer to the "ecological validity" (e.g. Ehrensberger-Dow and Massey 2019: 359-361) of their research designs, settings and results, and the workplaces themselves (e.g. Mo and Man 2017). Likewise, the natural, economic, linguistic, cultural, social, political and psycho-physiological environments in which the language mediator acts (e.g. Fang 2018), and the interconnected translation industry as a whole (e.g. van der Meer 2018), have been designated "eco-systems". Telling in this context is the fact that the forthcoming International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies' (IATIS) 7 th Conference, in 2021, will be devoted to the "cultural ecology of translation" 3 .
In the last decade or so, the connections between ecology and T&I have been explored more systematically in translation studies. Examples include, from a theoretical perspective, Cronin's (2017) approach to "eco-translation", and Hu's (2020) exploration of how eco-systemic and eco-holistic concepts inform the emerging paradigm of "eco-translatology". Principal among recent empirical research initiatives is Cadwell and O'Brien's (2016) case study of translation in disaster ICT.
Cronin first adopted the term "translation ecology" in Translation and Globalization (2003), where it was used to describe how translation and translators are key to promoting linguistic and cultural diversity through the control they can exert over which literary texts might be translated into and out of minority languages. His later eco-translation approach (Cronin 2017) extends the concept to one that is overtly derived from political ecology, which encompasses the study of the social, cultural, political and economic factors affecting the interaction of humans with other humans, other organisms, and the physical environment. Eco-translation "covers all forms of translation thinking and practice that knowingly engage with the challenges of human-induced environmental change" (Cronin 2017: 2; see also Cronin 2019: 519) and seeks to contribute, in the face of the immense challenges presented by environmental change, to "a post-anthropocentric identity which naturally affects all human activities including translation" (Cronin 2017: 3).
In bringing together the ecology of translation with natural ecology, the thrust of Hu's eco-translatology (2020) is ontological and systemic rather X X X X 37 than political. Yet Hu's model does have at its core an ethical imperative, which in this respect brings it close to Cronin: What Eco-translatology pursues is the holism and relevancy of translational ecology, and what it concerns is the balance and harmony of translational ecology. After all, who is to implement and practice a translation activity and maintain the holistic and related state of a translation activity? It is the translator as the representative of the "translation community" who implements and practices a translation activity, and it is only through the translator's coordination with other agents that the holistic and related state can be maintained. That is the translator's responsibility! Eco-translation ethics is a new ethics of "translator responsibility". Based on this, Eco-translatology defines "translator responsibility" […] as an ethical principle of crucial significance. (Hu 2020: 76) Hu's concept of eco-translatology revolves around a self-contained theoretical system of translation that is guided by eco-holism and the metaphoricity of the "survival of the fittest" (Fang 2020: ix). It is centred on the Darwinian principle of adaptation and selection, the rules of which are said to apply to both nature and translation. This principle guides the survival or extinction of (literary) translations, depending on the interaction between the various factors that make up the ecological environment of translation in which its various eco-systems function. These comprise the translation education, market and management eco-systems, all of which feed into the central translation eco-system itself (Hu 2020: 91-103). Hu's complex theoretical system is multi-dimensional and multi-layered. Its eco-systems are infinitely divisible on the vertical axis into subsystems and sub-subsystems, and they can be horizontally -or matricially -cross-related to other eco-systems and the (sub-)subsystems of which they themselves are composed (Hu 2020: 109-111).
Hu's presentation of eco-translatology is detailed and multi-faceted, but it does not elucidate a concrete methodology for investigating or validating the translational eco-system and its subsystems, beyond referring to itself as a practical interdisciplinary example of conjoining translation studies and ecology (2020: 62). For eco-systemic modelling based on empirical findings, we have to look elsewhere. Cadwell and O'Brien's (2016) demonstrate how, by adopting an eco-system perspective in a case study of translation in disaster ICT, we can enhance our understanding of the complex and changing interactions, relationships and contexts of language mediation in specific situations. The study looked into how foreign residents in the disaster zone of the 2011 Japanese earthquake, tsunami and ensuing nuclear accident in Fukushima communicated and gathered information about the disaster with and through forms of ICT. Applying a constructivist approach relying on multiple diverse perspectives rather than representativeness, the researchers used data from a series of in-depth, face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with participants. The results showed that a highly contextual definition of translation was needed to understand how the residents communicated during the event, prompting the researchers to propose a dynamic eco-systemic model to describe and explain their findings. The model is constructed on the observed principles of information roundput, the limiting factor of locality, the diversity of technological and human properties in the system, and the flexibility of the actors involved in the system. Translation itself is conceptualized as a subsidy realized by means of the agency of the human actors in the system. As such, it is able to ensure the circulation of information that helps drive the communicative eco-system during the disaster. The subsidy of human agency prompts Cadwell and O'Brien to draw implications that read like a research agenda: Who are the actors deciding to subsidise information circulation with translation? What linguistic and cultural barriers are they trying to mitigate? What relationships between human actors in the communicative ecosystem are they prioritising? At what points in time and space are they making these interventions? What are the costs and benefits or the intended or unintended consequences of these decisions? (Cadwell and O'Brien 2016: 569-570) Cadwell and O'Brien are referring to the narrower confines of translation and ICT in disaster settings. However, their questions could equally apply to language mediation in general, and T&I in particular, in any other setting or context. They, too, could fruitfully be explored with models borrowed and adapted from other disciplines which have themselves applied ecological concepts to achieve a better understanding of complex interrelated systems.

Interdisciplinary perspectives and borrowings
Translation studies has long been regarded as interdisciplinary in nature (Chesterman 2002). Gambier and Van Doorslaer (2016: 1-4), for instance, argue that it can be considered an interdiscipline comprising four shared Ecological Dimensions of Organizational T&I X X X X 39 basic elements on which other disciplines can help shed light: language, participants, situation and culture. For Munday (2016: 25), quoting McCarty, translation studies is the Phoenician trader among the "settled nations" of longer-established disciplines, primarily linked with linguistics, language studies, comparative literature, cultural studies and philosophy, among others.
As the example of ecology has already shown, the primacy of these traditionally more adjacent disciplines can now be extended. Increasingly, two further disciplines are also offering approaches, models and methods potentially beneficial to the study of translation: communication and organization studies. This paper will now address the latter, considering the potential of an amalgam of ecologically oriented and emergentist approaches from these two disciplines as a promising avenue for future research endeavours in translation studies.

A model from communication studies
In presenting the theoretical backdrop to their case study, Cadwell and O'Brien (2016: 563) initially cite the communicative ecology model proposed and operationalized by Hearn and Foth (2007) in the context of communication studies in order to illustrate the way in which the ecological metaphor and eco-systemic models have penetrated other disciplines, often well before being taken up by translation studies. Specifically, Foth and Hearn (2007: 756; see also Tacchi et al. 2003) define communicative ecology as "a milieu of agents connected in various ways by various exchanges of mediated and unmediated forms of communication". They themselves point to antecedents of their approach in the media ecology of McLuhan (1964) and Postman (1970), though they are keen to point out the key difference residing in their own "increased emphasis on the meaning that can be derived from the socio-cultural framing and analysis of the local context which communication occurs in" (Hearn and Foth 2007: 1). Applying the ecological metaphor offers a cogent means of analysing communication in specific locales, aiding our understanding of how activities are organized, the ways people define and experience their environments, and the implications for social order and organization.
It is on this basis that Foth and Hearn (2007) develop and apply their communicative ecology model to exploring the communicative ecology in inner-city apartment buildings. This is structured around three layers of analysis and interpretation -the technological, social and discursive -all of which are especially relevant to the investigation of situated T&I, too. The technological layer comprises the devices and connecting media that enable communication and interaction. The social layer is composed of people and the social modes of organizing them. The discursive layer consists of the messages, ideas and themes constituting the conversations and narratives of the communicative ecology being researched. From the T&I perspective, a particular appeal of model lies in the way it distils out the technological layer: as Cronin (2019: 526) remarks, "technology is not from an ecological perspective simply a lifeless tool or an instrument but an animated part of the human eco-system, a constituent element of the translator's transversal subjectivity".
The three layers cover all essential aspects of situated T&I. The strong suggestion is therefore that the model -combining an eco-systemic approach to the deployment of ICT with socio-cultural perspectives from communication studies -can help improve our interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge of the interactive dynamics between T&I and the specific locales where they take place. However, to fully comprehend the essential situatedness and cognitive embeddedness of T&I (Risku 2010;Muñoz Martín 2016) in the organizations in and for which they predominantly take place, it is necessary to consider the organizational settings themselves -and the role played by T&I within them. In this regard, organization studies represents another valuable interdisciplinary touchstone for translation studies.

A framework and research from organization studies
In organization studies, a powerful framework for investigating the role and agency of T&I comes in the form of "Communication Constitutes Organization" (CCO) (Schoeneborn et al. 2019). Recent research conducted both explicitly and implicitly within this framework indicates that translators' agency can be a valuable organizational asset (Piekkari et al. 2020), but one X X X X 41 whose impact is restricted by self-concept issues and overly linear, top-down processes that prevent translators' and other agents' interactive involvement in both conveying and shaping organizational identities and strategic messages (Christensen and Cornelissen 2013;Massey and Wieder 2019). In a nutshell, CCO is an emergentist frame for organizational development and culture that can give decisive impetus to T&I research in corporate and other organizational settings. It is predicated on the assumption, increasingly validated by empirical research, that organizational identities evolve and change through the multiplicity of the voices that constitute them (Christensen and Cornelissen 2013: 63-66;Schoeneborn et al. 2019).
Research in organization studies conducted on paraprofessional translators operating in organizational settings, in other words individuals whose principal professional role and activities within an organization are not defined as translation (or interpreting), constitutes a growing field of inquiry (e.g. Piekkari et al. 2013;Chidlow et al. 2014;Ciuk and James 2015). Recently, studies (e.g. Tietze et al. 2017;Ciuk et al. 2019;Piekkari et al. 2020) have shown that translators command a "hidden power" (Piekkari et al. 2020: 5) in reshaping meaning through the interpretative decisions they make as they translate messages for purposes of internal and external communication. Their language resources and translatorial repertoires decisively affect their positions and roles at the workplace and influence how they can use these to advance personal and organizational goals. In their capacity as language mediators, they acquire strong actual and potential organizational agency in taking part in building corporate identities and cultures across language barriers, in contributing to multilingual strategic and operational communication within and without the organization, and in helping to promote corporate visibility, branding and marketing in other linguistic cultures.
It would seem rational to think that the same agency would extend to professional translators. However, there is evidence to indicate that paraprofessionals are less constrained by the professional norms, codes of conduct and the self-concepts engrained in professional translators' habitus (Koskinen 2020a), exerting more agency and adopting more adaptive and creative translation strategies than the professionals. Indeed, Piekkari et al. (2020Piekkari et al. ( : 1323Piekkari et al. ( -1324 contrast the creative and innovative approaches adopted by paraprofessional translatorial agents, "more visible on the organizational scene", with the "invisible activity" of professional (interlingual) translation, claiming that "the skopos of the translation is often likely to be much more personal than for professional translators rendering their services to clients, and the former can therefore be expected to take on more agentic roles". This view cements the invisible, instrumentalist conceptualization of professional translators' roles and responsibilities that Venuti (2019) famously takes such issue with. In his cogently argued translation polemic, Venuti (2019: 1) very convincingly demonstrates that translation is not "the reproduction or transfer of an invariant that is contained in or caused by the source text" but always "an interpretive act that inevitably varies source-text form, meaning, and effect according to intelligibilities and interests in the receiving culture".
Even to those who would not fully subscribe to Venuti's radical hermeneutics, the true situation of today's language mediators in general, and translators in particular, is patently much more nuanced than organization studies researchers suppose. To cite one obvious example, the skopos of a translation brief might easily require adaptive or transcreational approaches from the translator. The creative solutions ascribed to paraprofessionals by organization studies specialists lie very much within the professional translator's scope, as the rapidly growing professional field of transcreation amply demonstrates. Indeed, the translation industry is witnessing an increasing shift in demand for added-value human translation towards user-centrism, intercultural mediation and adaptive, transcreational work (Katan 2016;Koskinen 2020a;Massey and Ehrensberger-Dow 2017). Alongside the growing realization that translation can and should adopt a strategic function of translation in organizations (van der Meer 2020), the upshot is therefore that the profession as a whole needs to adopt a more identifiably interventionist role in the agency that translators exercise.
Research by Wieder (2019, 2020) has identified a clear need in international corporate communications and the broader field of organizational communication for developing language professionals' potential as co-creative intercultural mediators, as linguistic, textual and cultural consultants, and as quality assurers and risk managers in multilingual communication processes. But until now, there have also been manifold constraints on the ability to adopt such roles. The limiting factors derive in large part from the excessively top-down and linear models currently governing corporate communications and translation quality standards. Corporate communications models aim for aligned, integrated and consistent communication, and thus deny employees participation and empowerment (Christensen et al. X X X X 43 2008). They are also overly linear, reducing communication to a sender-biased conduit "that ignores or at least downplays the interpretative propensities and capabilities of the alleged receiver" (Christensen and Cornelissen 2013: 50-51). Similar caveats apply to the linear input-output models of translation service provision developed in quality standards such as ISO 17100 (2015). These allow for only restricted feedback loops that are delayed (end-of-production and post-production), mediated (by project managers) and monodirectional (running one-way from the requesters, revisers and reviewers to the translators), at best with only very few systematic feedback channels from the translators to the authors or the requesters themselves. The models also provide for only limited feedforward, largely comprising standard normative documentation (technical specifications, style guides, wordings etc.) that rarely addresses strategic communication needs.
The barriers to professional translators' realizing their potential for organizational agency have been compounded by their own vocational self-concept. Surveys carried out internationally and in Switzerland over the last decade or so reveal that translators see themselves working in a largely low-autonomy profession where fidelity to the source text ranks highest in their judgment of where their professional loyalties should lie. Mediating, advising and co-creating rank lowest amongst the roles they see themselves properly occupying (Katan 2011(Katan , 2016Massey and Wieder 2019). In the international surveys reported by Katan (2011Katan ( , 2016, 60% of respondents agreed absolutely with minimum intervention in conveying translated messages, and only 30% found it usual to actively mediate cultural differences. This has been at least partly ascribed to the priority given to fidelity by numerous ethical codes of practice among professional translation and interpreting associations worldwide (Katan 2016: 369-371;Schäffner 2020: 66), which Lambert (2018: 269) pithily critiques as a "fictional construction of the translator as a neutral conduit".
Given the current re-positioning of the T&I professions towards human added value in the age of artificial intelligence, it is vitally important to discover more about the current processes and practices of language mediators working within the communicative ecologies of the organizations that employ them. Only by observing and describing them can we hope to identify the agentic potential of T&I professionals, and then act upon those findings in the interest of the organizations that use their services and to the benefit of the language mediators themselves.

Exploring T&I in the communicative ecologies of organizations
The time is therefore ripe to recalibrate research to explore the ecological dimensions of organizational T&I. As we have seen, CCO offers a comprehensive and cogent framework to pursue the question of evolving language-mediator roles, responsibilities and agency within organizations. Likewise, Hearn and Foth's (2007) stratified model of communicative ecology supplies the layers of interpretation needed to tease out the subsidy of human agentic translation. But what methodologies and specific methods might be used to collect and process the data, and to purposefully act on the results? Three principles emerge from the above. The first and most obvious is that the research should be workplace-based and oriented not solely on the individual actors, but on the entire socio-technical and socio-cultural networks of the organizations in which they operate. The second is that, in order for agency within networks to be recognized by the various actors themselves, a participatory approach will be necessary, integrating the researchers into the organizational settings under investigation and blurring distinctions between researchers and those ostensibly being researched. The third is that, if agency is not only to be recognized but also to be realized, then observation should at a certain point give way to action. Taken together, the principles suggest a combination of workplace-based ethnographic observation and network action research.
The type of place-based or situated ethnographic research that recommends itself has already been pioneered by Risku (2016), Koskinen (2008) and Pedersen (2016Pedersen ( , 2019 to study workplace processes and practices in a commercial translation agency, in an institutional translation unit at the European Commission, and in transcreational processes, spaces and interactions at a marketing agency, respectively. These are key examples of what Koskinen (2020b) has recently described as "translatorial linguistic ethnography". The research done focuses on the persons and their encounters in the specific contexts of their work, involving the traditional ethnographic methodology of following and observing the actors, asking them about their activities and experiences by interview and questionnaire, and recording the results in field notes, protocols, analyses and so forth. The specifically translatorial and linguistic elements of the ethnography are generated by following, collecting and examining the textual and communicative data produced. X X X X 45 Yet, the purposeful investigation of agency also implies acting and transforming, which establishes the necessity of supplementing these observational and analytical ethnographic approaches with participation, action and evaluation. It is here that the approaches and methodology of ethnography are joined with network action research. Use cases are provided by Tacchi et al. (2003) as well as Foth and Hearn (2007). In both cases, ethnographic methods used to research actions, interactions and effects within socio-technical networks are underpinned by the classic action research cycle of planning (to improve a practice), doing or acting (to implement it), observing (to describe its effects) and reflecting (to evaluate outcomes). Tacchi et al. (2003) develop and apply an ethnographic action research methodology, a hybrid of approaches from ethnography and action research, as a way of researching, understanding and developing ICT projects in various contexts (with concrete examples of implementation in India being presented and discussed). The researchers proceed from a holistic concept of communicative ecology to examine the whole structure of communication and information in a people's way of life: the media mixes and repertoires of communication resources and skills, the social organization of media in different activity settings (home, work, etc.) and the social networks in which they are used (Tacchi et al. 2003: 14-17). On the process level, the rich data collected by ethnographic methods feed into the action research cycle. The toolbox of key methods (Tacchi et al. 2003: 51-102) used to collect data covers the usual ethnographic techniques of following, observing, asking, recording and analysing: participant observation and field notes, in-depth and group interviews, participant diaries and self-documentation, questionnaire surveys, published information and documentary material on the locality where the project is situated, as well as feedback mechanisms designed to gather information about the project and the organizations engaged in it.
Aiming to provide an empirical basis for the theoretical concept of networked individualism, Foth and Hearn (2007) build on designs proposed by Tacchi et al. (2003) to develop their own approach to what they call network action research. Their study of the social networks of residents in three inner-city apartment buildings proposes new ways to conceptualize the roles of social networks of residents in order to better inform the design of new technology. They seek to do so by invoking the holistic model of communicative ecology to better understand the dynamic interrelationships between communication technologies and the social dimensions of the residents' interactions. Applying the participatory design principles of action research, selected individual residents and their immediate social clusters engaged with one another and the researchers in a peer-to-peer mode of exchange. The study participants thus created a network of inquiry at once generating research data and feeding them back into the action research cycles of intervention and reflection (Foth and Hearn 2007: 752-753). Reflecting on their methodology, Foth and Hearn (2007: 764-765) highlight the promising analytical possibilities for the future research presented by the ecology metaphor. In particular, they note the advantages of being able to analyse the engagement of the population within each ecology, to extract and examine the particular rules of engagement, to investigate the boundaries, coherence and stability of an ecology, and ultimately, to understand the requirements and the conditions for the sustainability or the failure of an ecology. There are obvious ramifications here for the agentic role of translators and interpreters within the communicative ecologies of organizations.
When it comes to the particular communicative ecologies involving T&I, therefore, the melding of ethnography with network action research has the distinct potential to alter the perceptions, processes, agency and roles of professional T&I in organizations. Institutional actions aimed at optimizing language mediators' textual, multilingual and intercultural competences, such as the "Meet the Drafters" project recently implemented by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation or the European Parliament's "Citizen Language" initiative, could be fruitfully embedded within combined ethnographic and network action research projects to ascertain the effects of such measures on the development and identity of the organization. From an organizational perspective, it is clearly not just paraprofessional translators and interpreters that deserve the researchers' attention, especially at a time when more and more traditional roles and responsibilities of language mediators are being constantly re-evaluated due to the rapid advances in language technology.

Conclusion
In this brief paper, I have attempted to indicate the importance of investigating the rich layers of communicative ecologies where translators and interpreters work, and of acting on the results. To conduct productive X X X X 47 research in this field, the interdiscipline that is translation studies can benefit not only from eco-systemic approaches and models to disentangle, describe and explain the complex situated phenomena of T&I in organizational settings, but also from research frameworks, methodologies and methods deployed in communication and organization studies. These include CCO and models of communicative ecology, together with the ethnographic and network action research methodologies that go with them. Recalibrating T&I research to accommodate such interdisciplinary approaches will help us to understand more fully the organizational agency of professional T&I and, stepping beyond observation to action, purposefully and adequately meet the needs of the organizations in and for which they operate.